At Elastra’s request, I didn’t write further about them back when I was interested in doing so. But you can go find out about them yourself. Basically, their secret sauce is that they write deployment instructions in a few hundred lines of two proprietary markup languages. They have ambitions beyond DBMS, and beyond the Amazon cloud.

There have been dozens of applicants for the EnterpriseDB/Elastra beta program. As is usual in limited beta programs, EnterpriseDB is trying to sort out the ones who’ll make a big commitment from the tire-kickers.

The main interest in EnterpriseDB/Elastra has come from ISVs, and secondarily from purely online businesses (e.g., SaaS vendors, web businesses, and a large MMO game vendor). There’s been a little interest from enterprises.

Significant fractions of the EnterpriseDB/Elastra beta applications come from each of the Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL user communities. A few come from SQL Server. None come from DB2.

Bob praised Elastra for its technology in clustering, starting/stopping instances, etc. He also said that EnterpriseDB had “educated” Elastra on EnterpriseDB internals and/or admin tools, to make the integration work.

EnterpriseDB will start turning on a few beta Elastra customers any day now (i.e., it may well not take until March, the original target).

When Elastra announced their service to host MySQL and PostgreSQL in the Amazon S3/EC2 cloud, I immediately told my dear darling clients at EnterpriseDB they should do the same. Whereupon they told me it would happen soon. However, they neglected to tell me when it was actually announced. So I know no more than can be found in this Computerworld article.

But I’ll say this — it’s a very tempting option, both for new web-based applications or businesses, or simply as a development platform pending later redeployment.

Elastra is a startup offering MySQL and PostgreSQL SaaS instances in the Amazon S3/EC2 cloud. On their board is John Hummer, which I generally regard as a good thing, although it’s hardly a guarantee of success.* High Scalability raises some doubts about Elastra’s pricing, but I think that may be missing the point. Read more